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Tuesday, 24 May 2016

ANTHOLOGY OF TURKISH EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC 1961-2014

For years we walked right past the Aspendos Bar & Grill on York Way 'til one day we'd just got back from a holiday, hungry and desperate for a quick nosh so we ventured inside this Turkish restaurant where, to our amazement, the Lamb shish was great - and cheap! So now we're converts and have convinced ourselves that we lead the way towards this place's increasing popularity by pioneering the idea that people who read Sartre and Ballard may also dine in what appears, superficially, to be where only the Sun-reading, obese, tracksuit-wearing proletariat eat - ha-ha! I swear, last week, that table of four would normally be seen in more fashionable local gastropubs...

...so this 'feast' of Turkish experimental music from Sub Rosa (tenuous connection? me? never!) - it's a whopper (missus) but overall the quality's good, ranging from '61 to '12, glitchy, ambient, noisy, you know the kind of thing. Oddly, chronology-wise, there's a big gap between Bülent Arel's Postlude (1961) until Ilhan Mimaroglu's Prelude No.17 (Istanbul Fog) (1996), then loads from the 2000s and 2010s. According to the sleeve notes, the early pioneers had few followers to take up the mantle. Their tracks do stand out to me as exceptional pieces, but 2/5BZ by Anadolog (1997) is one example of great things that were to come much later; a perfect blend of tradition and contemporary electronics. Batur Sönmez's Flash Mental Experiment No.23 (2012) is fine piece of noise, whereas Batuhan Bozkurt's Kun (2012) takes a more acousmatic soundscape route, as does Reverie Falls On All's Eta Carinae from the same year.

Typically (of me, anyway) it takes a while to really absorb a big comp but this anthology is proving very worthwhile.